The Best of Michael Moorcock Page 9

  I am still of a secular disposition. “Or perhaps,” I suggested, “as God you sent yourself a vision?”

  He did not find this blasphemous but neither did he think it worth pursuing. “It’s much of muchness, that,” he said.

  He was content in his beliefs. He had questioned them once but now he was convinced. “God sent me a vision and I followed her. She was made flesh. A miracle. I went with her to where she lived, in the fields of colour, in the far ether. We were married. We gave birth to a new human creature, neither male nor female but self-reproducing, a new messiah, and it set us free at last to dwell on that vast multiplicity of the heavens, to contemplate a quasi-infinity of versions of ourselves, our histories, our experience. That was what God granted me, my dear, when he sent me my Rose. Perhaps I was the Antichrist, after all, or at least its parent.”

  “In your vision did you see what became of the child?”

  He spoke with light-hearted familiarity, not recalling some distant dream but describing an immediate reality. “Oh, yes. It grew to lead the world upon a new stage in our evolution. I’m not sure you’d believe the details, my dear, or find them very palatable.”

  I smiled at this, but for the first time in my life felt a hint of profound terror and I suppressed a sudden urge to shout at him, to tell him how ridiculous I considered his visions, a bizarre blend of popular prophecy and alchemical mumbo-jumbo which even a New Age traveller would take with a pinch of E. My anger overwhelmed me. Though I regained control of it he recognised it. He continued to speak but with growing reluctance and perhaps melancholy. “I saw a peculiar inevitability to the process. What, after all, do most of us live for? Ourselves? And what use is that? What value? What profit?”

  With a great sigh he put down his fork. “That was delicious.” His satisfaction felt to me like an accolade.

  “You’re only describing human nature.” I took his plate.

  “Is that what keeps us on a level with the amoeba, my dear, and makes us worth about as much individual affection? Come now! We allow ourselves to be ruled by every brutish, greedy instinct, not by what is significantly human in our nature! Our imagination is our greatest gift. It gives us our moral sensibility.” He looked away through the dining-room window at the glittering domes of Gautier House and in the light the lines of his face were suddenly emphasised.

  I had no wish ever to quarrel with him again. The previous argument, we were agreed, had cost us both too much. But I had to say what I thought. “I was once told the moment I mentioned morality was the moment I’d crossed the line into lunacy,” I said. “I suppose we must agree to understand things differently.”

  For once he had forgotten his usual courtesy. I don’t think he heard me. “Wasn’t all this damage avoidable?” he murmured. “Weren’t there ways in which cities could have grown up as we grew up, century adding to century, style to style, wisdom to wisdom? Isn’t there something seriously wrong with the cycle we’re in? Isn’t there some way out?”

  I made to reply but he shook his head, his hands on the table. “I saw her again, you know, several times after the birth. How beautiful she was! How much beauty she showed me! It’s like an amplification, my dear, of every sense! A discovery of new senses. An understanding that we don’t need to discard anything as long as we continue to learn from it. It isn’t frightening what she showed me. It’s perfectly familiar once you begin to see. It’s like looking at the quintessential versions of our ordinary realities. Trees, animals—they’re there, in essence. You begin to discover all that. The fundamental geometry’s identified. Well, you’ve seen this new math, haven’t you?”

  He seemed so vulnerable at that moment that for once I wasn’t frank. I was unconvinced by what I judged as hippy physics made possible only by the new creative powers of computers. I didn’t offer him an argument.

  “You can’t help but hope that it’s what death is like,” he said. “You become an angel.”

  He got up and returned slowly to his dusty study, beckoning me to look out with him into the twilight gathering around the trees where crows croaked their mutual reassurances through the darkening air. He glanced only once towards the old elm then turned his head away sharply. “You’ll think this unlikely, I know, but we first came together physically at midnight under a full moon as bright and thin and yellow as honesty in a dark blue sky. I looked at the moon through those strong black branches the moment before we touched. The joy of our union was indescribable. It was a confirmation of my faith. I made a mistake going back into public life. What good did it do for anyone, my dear?”

  “We all made too many easy assumptions,” I said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I discovered sentimental solutions and comforted myself with them. Those comforts I turned to material profit. They became lies. And I lost her, my dear.” He made a small, anguished gesture. “I’m still waiting for her to come back.”

  He was scarcely aware of me. I felt I had intruded upon a private moment and suggested that I had tired him and should leave. Looking at me in surprise but without dispute he came towards me, remarking in particular on the saffron sauce. “I can’t tell you how much it meant to me, my dear, in every way.”

  I promised to return the following Wednesday and cook. He licked his pink lips in comic anticipation and seemed genuinely delighted by the prospect. “Yum, yum.” He embraced me suddenly with his frail body, his sweet face staring blindly into mine.

  I had found his last revelations disturbing and my tendency was to dismiss them perhaps as an early sign of his senility. I even considered putting off my promised visit, but was already planning the next lunch when three days later I took a call from Mrs. Arthur Begg who kept an eye on him and had my number. The Clapham Antichrist had died in his sleep. She had found him at noon with his head raised upon his massive pillows, the light from the open window falling on his face. She enthused over his wonderful expression in death.

  The Opium General (1982)

  “The Opium General” was originally published in The Opium General and Other Stories (Harrap) in 1984.

  A rarity in the Moorcock canon, being a wholly non-fantastical story, it shares a great deal in common, thematically, with “A Dead Singer.”

  The Opium General

  They had lived in a kind of besieged darkness for several weeks. At first she had welcomed the sense of solitude after the phone was cut off. They ignored the front door unless friends knew the secret knock. It was almost security, behind the blinds. From his ugly anxiety Charlie had calmed for a while but had soon grown morose and accusatory. There were too many creditors. The basement flat turned into a prison he was afraid to leave. When she had arrived three years ago it had seemed a treasure house; now she saw it merely as a record of his unrealised dreams: his half-read books, his comics, his toys, his synthesisers no longer stimulated him yet he refused to get rid of a single broken model Spitfire. They were tokens of his former substance, of a glorious past. When she suggested they go for a walk he said: “Too many people know me in Notting Hill.” He meant the customers he had burned, taking money for drugs he never delivered, and the important dealers he had never paid. He tried to form a unity of his many frustrations: a general pattern, a calculated plot against him. A friend was murdered in a quarrel over sulphate at a house in Talbot Road. He decided the knife had been meant for him. “I’ve made too many enemies.” This was his self-pitying phase.

  She steered him as best she could away from paranoia. She was frightened by overt instability, but had learned to feel relaxed so long as the signs were unadmitted, buried. In response to her nervousness he pulled himself together in the only way he knew: the appropriate image. He said it was time for a stiff upper-lip, for holding the thin red line. She was perfectly satisfied, her sympathy for him was restored and she had been able to keep going. He became like Leslie Howard in an old war film. She tried to find somebody who could help him. This awful uncertainty stopped him doing his best. If he got clear, got a bi
t of money, they could start afresh. He wanted to write a novel: in Inverness, he thought, where he had worked in an hotel. Once away she could calm him down, get him to be his old self. But there remained the suspicion he might still choose madness as his escape. His friends said he habitually got himself into mental hospitals where he need feel no personal responsibility. He said, though, that it was chemical.

  “Nobody’s after you, Charlie, really.” She had spent hours trying to win round all the big dealers. She went to see some of them on her own. They assured her with dismissive disgust that they had written off his debts and forgotten about him but would never do business with him again. The landlord was trying to serve them with a summons for almost a year’s unpaid rent and had been unnecessarily rude the last time she had appealed to him. She blamed herself. She had longed for a return of the euphoria of their first weeks together. There had been plenty of money then, or at least credit. She had deliberately shut out the voice of her own common sense. In her drugged passivity she let him convince her something concrete would come of his elaborate fantasies; she lent her own considerable manipulative powers to his, telling his bank-manager of all the record-companies who were after his work, of the planned tour, of the ex-agent who owed him a fortune. This lifted him briefly and he became the tall handsome red-headed insouciant she had first met. “Partners in bullshit,” he said cheerfully. “You should be on the stage, Ellie. You can be a star in my next road-show.” It had been his apparent good-humoured carelessness in the face of trouble which made him seem so attractive to her three years ago when she left home to live here. She had not realised nobody in the music business would work with him any more, not even on sessions, because he got so loony. It was nerves, she knew, but he could be so rude to her, to everybody, and make a terrible impression. At the very last guest spot he had done, in Dingwalls, the roadies deliberately sabotaged his sound because he had been so overbearing. As Jimmy had told her gravely later: “Ye canna afford to get up the roadies’ noses, Ellie. They can make or break a set.” Jimmy had been Charlie’s partner in their first psychedelic group, but had split the third time Charlie put himself in the bin. It was a bad sign, Jimmy told her, when Charlie started wearing his “army suit,” as he had done to the Dingwalls gig.

  Over the past two weeks Charlie had worn his uniform all the time. It seemed to make him feel better. “Look out for snipers, Algy,” he warned her when she went shopping. He kept the shutters of the front-room windows closed, lay in bed all day and stayed up at night rolling himself cigarettes and fiddling with his little Casio synthesiser. He needed R&R, he said. When, through tiredness, she had snapped at him not to be so silly, playing at soldiers, he turned away from her sorrowfully: a military martyr, a decent Englishman forced into the dirty business of war. “This isn’t fun for any of us.” His father had been a regular sergeant in the Royal Artillery and had always wanted Charlie to go to Sandhurst. His parents were in Africa now, running a Bulawayo grocery shop. He frequently addressed her as sergeant-major. Creditors became “the enemy”; he needed more troops, reinforcements, fresh supplies. “What about a cup of coffee, s’a’rnt-major?” and she would have to get up to make him one. His old friends found the rôle familiar. They didn’t help by playing up to it. “How’s the general?” they would ask. He got out his military prints, his badges, his model soldiers, his aircraft charts. They were on every wall and surface now. He read Biggles books and old copies of The Eagle.

  His last phone call had been to Gordon in Camden. “’Morning to you, field marshal. Spot of bother at this end. Pinned down under fire. Troops needing supplies. What can you get to us?” Gordon, his main coke-supplier, told him to fuck himself. “The chap’s gone over to the enemy.” Charlie was almost crying. “Turned yellow. Made of the wrong bally stuff.” She pushed her long pale hair away from her little oval face and begged him to talk normally. “Nobody’s going to take you seriously if you put on a funny voice.”

  “Can’t think what you mean, old thing.” He straightened his black beret on his cropped head. He had always been vain but now he spent fifty per cent of his waking time in front of the mirror. “Don’t tell me you’re crackin’, too.” He rode his motorbike to Brixton and came back with cash, claiming he had been cheated on the price. “We’re going to have transport and logistics problems for a bit, s’a’rnt-major. But we’ll get by somehow, eh? Darkest before the dawn and so on.” She had just begun to warm to his courage when he gloomily added: “But I suppose you’ll go AWOL next. One simply can’t get the quality of front-line chap.” All his other girlfriends had finally been unable to take him. She swore she was not the same. She made him a cup of tea and told him to go to bed and rest: her own universal remedy. It always seemed to work for her. Dimly she recognised his desperate reaching for certainties and order, yet his “general” was slowly wearing her down. She asked her mother to come to stay with her for a couple of days. “You should be on your own, love,” said her mother. She was discomfited by Charlie’s rôle. “Get yourself a little place. A job.”

  Ellie spread her short fingers on the table and stared at them. She was numb all over. He had made her senses flare like a firework; now she felt spent. She looked dreadful, said her mother. She was too thin, she was wearing too much make-up and perfume. Charlie liked it she said. “He’s not doing you any good, love. The state of you!” All this in a murmur, while Charlie napped in the next room.

  “I can’t let him down now.” Ellie polished her nails. “Everybody owes him money.” But she knew she was both too frightened to leave and felt obscurely that she had given him more than his due, that he owed her for something. There was nobody else to support her; she was worn out. It was up to him. She would get him on his feet again, then he would in turn help her.

  “You’d be better off at home,” said her mother doubtfully. “Dad’s a lot calmer than he used to be.” Her father hated Charlie. The peculiar thing was they were very much alike in a lot of ways. Her father looked back with nostalgia to wartime and his Tank Regiment.

  She and her mother went up to Tesco’s together. The Portobello Road was crowded as usual, full of black women with prams and shopping bags, Pakistani women in saris, clutching at the hands of two or three kids, old hippies in big miserable coats, Irish drunks, gypsies, a smattering of middle-class women from the other side of Ladbroke Grove. Her mother hated the street; she wanted them to move somewhere more respectable. They pushed the cart round the supermarket. Her mother paid for the groceries. “At least you’ve got your basics for a bit,” she said. She was a tiny, harassed woman with a face permanently masked, an ear permanently deaf to anything but the most conventional statements. “Bring Charlie to Worthing for a couple of weeks. It’ll do you both good.” But Charlie knew, as well as anyone, that he and Ellie’s dad would be at loggerheads within a day. “Got to stay at HQ,” he said. “Position could improve any moment.” He was trying to write new lyrics for Jimmy’s band, but they kept coming out the same as those they’d done together ten years before, about war and nuclear bombs and cosmic soldiers. Her mother returned to Worthing with a set, melancholy face; her shoulders rounded from thirty years of dogged timidity. Ellie noticed her own shoulders were becoming hunched, too. She made an effort to straighten them and then heard in her mind Charlie (or was it her dad?) saying “back straight, stomach in” and she let herself slump again. This self-defeating defiance was the only kind she dared allow herself. Her long hair (which Charlie insisted she keep) dragged her head to the ground.

  That night he burned all his lyrics. “Top Secret documents,” he called them. When she begged him to stop, saying somebody would buy them surely, he rounded on her. “If you’re so into money, why don’t you go out and earn some?” She was afraid to leave him to his own devices. He might do anything while she was away. He’d have a new girlfriend in five minutes. He couldn’t stand being alone. She had thought him sensitive and vulnerable when he courted her. They met in a pub near the Music Machine. He
seemed so interested in her, at once charmingly bold, shy and attentive. He made her laugh. She had mothered him a bit, she supposed. She would have done anything for him. Could that have been a mistake?

  “You’ve got to find out what you want,” said her sluttish friend Joan, who lived with an ex-biker. “Be independent.” Joan worked at the health-food shop and was into feminism. “Don’t let any fucking feller mess you around. Be your own woman.” But Joan was bisexual and had her eye on Ellie. Her objectivity couldn’t be trusted. Joan was having trouble with her old man yet she didn’t seem about to split.

  “I don’t know who I am.” Ellie stared at the Victorian screen Charlie had bought her. It had pictures of Lancers and Guardsmen varnished brownish yellow. “I was reading. We all define ourselves through other people, don’t we?”

  “Not as much as you do, dearie,” said Joan. “What about a holiday? I’m thinking of staying at this cottage in Wales next month. We could both do with a break away from blokes.”

  Ellie said she’d think about it. She now spent most of her time in the kitchen looking out at the tiny overgrown yard. She made up lists in her mind: lists of things they could sell, lists of outfits she could buy, lists of places she would like to visit, lists of people who might be able to help Charlie. She had a list of their debts in a drawer somewhere. She considered a list of musicians and A&R men they knew. But these days all Charlie had that people wanted was dope contacts. And nobody would let him have as much as a joint on credit any more. It was disgusting. People kept in touch because you could help them score. The minute you weren’t useful, they dropped you. Charlie wouldn’t let her say this, though. He said it was her fault. She turned friends against him. “Why don’t you fuck off, too? You’ve had everything I’ve got.” But when she began to pack (knowing she could not leave) he told her he needed her. She was all he had left. He was sorry for being a bastard.